From my sick bed last week, I noodled around travel sites fervidly (anywhere with sun sweet christ!) and continually returned to familiar images of an idyllic Greek island. Four years ago I went to Santorini for August Bank Holiday with three girlfriends. We stayed in a rooftop spa hotel. With an infinity pool. I remember clapping my hands with glee at the gorgeous whitewashed walls of the perfect villa and enormous bed I had all to myself. After living for years miles from the sea opening the wooden shutters to a boundless vista of azure blue, brought tears to my eyes. The sun shone all day everyday, lovely Greek boys brought vodka cocktails to our loungers on request; it was the last time I was seen in a bikini. The four of us spent our days reading, swimming, putting the world to rights and indulging in massages looking out over the Aegean Sea. We ventured into the local village for languid late lunches and wandered through the higgledy-piggledy streets picking up trinkets along the way. Sunburnt and freshly showered, we spent our evenings in the port of Oia, drinking wine and eating seafood the local fisherman had brought by boat to the Taverna just hours before. The sunsets are every bit as breathtaking as people say.

On reflection it was probably the crappiest holiday I have ever endured.

Behind these idyllic scenes I was ‘kind of’ in a relationship with the Australian; in the supermarket of love, why is it that the produce doesn’t come properly labelled? I was also in the middle of reiki teachings and this was bringing up all kinds of shit for me. Like pure white hot rage. At my father, the ex-husband, the Australian, and pretty much every. other. fucking. little. thing.

The one that had organised our travellytrip, told us on the second day that she had met someone. She was so alive, sparkly; in that first flush of lust. It was clearly an intoxicating and seductive affair. They had met on another trip we had all taken together earlier in the year, something had bloomed unbeknownst to us and since then they had scrambled to be together at every opportunity. They couldn’t be more different: homeland, faith, background, age. She was having a fling with an older man. It was hot. And it would have been so much easier to bare, had she not already been in a relationship with a mutual friend. And had my ex-husband not left me for someone else only months before.

Her revelation gave me the perfect scapegoat for all of my rage-filled feelings; at her lack of remorse, her ability to replace her current partner so easily. Having found a safe place to voice her secret I hated how she revealed the most intimate details of their encounters, how she described her new love with such certainty of his feelings for her. I had none of these things. I had been replaced. Wronged. Left. I was the victim of exactly this behaviour. How could she dry my tears and join in the chorus of support for me, and yet treat her partner with the same contempt? And how come this new fellow was able to love her so quickly and so passionately when all I got from the Australian was the occasional tit-bit I had to work really hard for. Had the world gone fucking mad?! It was just so unfair. I did not voice any of this. I couldn’t speak about it. For the rest of our trip, all I could do was feel this horrid stomach-churning anger and jealousy at the sheer fucking injustice of it all.

After we returned home, our friendship sadly disintegrated over my stumbled attempts to not blame her and yet blame her for everything that had happened to me. She was an easy replacement for wrongs committed by my ex-husband who had flung aside any responsibility or respect he might have had for me, in pursuit of his own new romance.

Friends should be our insurance against the vagaries of love, not the cause of our dismay. And perhaps it was callous of her not to have anticipated my distress. But the fallout from our weekend shook me out of my seemingly endless capacity for martyrdom. In the bluntest of ways I was taught a lesson: that lust can make people incredibly self-absorbed. As can grief.

I wonder from time to time how she is. And also if it is true that everything is forgiveable.

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